MakeUseOf

I asked ChatGPT to find me a free movie and didn't expect this

Tashreef Shareef — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:01:17 GMT

Tubi is one of the best free streaming services around. Yes, it's ad-supported, but it offers an excellent collection of classic movies and TV series that you can watch anytime, anywhere. However, like every streaming service, finding something new to watch is a chore. Most days, I spend so much time scrolling through the catalog that I'm done with my dinner before I've picked something to watch.

I asked Gemini to write my Home Assistant automations, and it actually worked well

Shaun Cichacki — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:00:17 GMT

Home Assistant is one of the most powerful pieces of equipment out there for anyone who has smart-home electronics. It's also one of the most complicated. Many people are willing to try it out for a while, and then will quickly bounce off in favor of the simplicity of Google Home or Alexa. Rather than tapping a few simple buttons, Home Assistant is best used by those who are willing to dive deep into their smart home ecosystem and are willing to learn YAML or Jinja2.

My smart home runs through this one device, and I stopped buying dedicated hubs years ago

Chris Hachey — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:00:18 GMT

I've had a great experience with my smart speakers. Over the years, I've had a Google Home and a Nest Hub as I was trying to figure out what might be right for my home. But it ultimately came down to something that my wife and I found when we were unpacking boxes when we first moved in together.

Claude can now design your slide decks — and a whole lot more

Dave Schafer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:49:26 GMT

Anthropic has been on a tear lately. On April 16, the company released a major model update with Claude Opus 4.7. And today, April 17, Anthropic announced a powerful new tool called Claude Design that aims to do for design work what Claude Code does for development.

Task Manager is lying to you about RAM — here's how to find out what's really happening

Rob LeFebvre — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:00:17 GMT

Have you ever gone to Task Manager to figure out why your PC feels so slow, so sluggish? If you have, you might have noticed that nothing looks obviously wrong, but memory use is high and your machine is crawling. Why doesn't Windows tell you what's going on?

4 everyday tasks I handed to OpenClaw and instantly stopped doing myself

Raghav Sethi — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:00:17 GMT

I have finally been catching up with OpenClaw, and while most people seem to be using it for work stuff, I have been quietly building out a bunch of personal automations on the side. Getting it running the way I wanted was not exactly a weekend project. There were more than a few evenings spent down rabbit holes I did not plan on going down.

I use a Thunderbolt dock without a laptop, and it’s more useful than you’d think

Brady Snyder — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:30:17 GMT

Thunderbolt has revolutionized I/O connections for laptops and other portable computing devices. With a single Thunderbolt cable, you can bridge a laptop to a variety of external accessories, like displays, peripherals, and storage devices. However, Thunderbolt hubs and docks aren't exclusively used for laptops and tablets.

I had low expectations for Apple's $499 laptop, then I ran the benchmarks

Brandon Miniman — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:00:16 GMT

Like many, I had low expectations for the MacBook Neo, but on paper it seemed like a game-changer. How could a laptop with iPhone guts (the Neo has an iPhone A18 Pro CPU with only 8GB of RAM — pretty much the same internals as the 2025 iPhone 16 Pro) keep up with my demanding workload, let alone the fact that with my wife's education discount (she's a teacher), the laptop was only $499?

I added a second display to my phone, but it’s not the kind you think

Brady Snyder — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:31:17 GMT

Dual-screen smartphones aren't science fiction, they're real. There are cheap and expensive ways to add an extra screen to the back of your smartphone. One method is to buy a foldable phone and use the cover screen as a rear display, which is helpful for taking selfies or shooting video. Another, more accessible, way is to buy an external MagSafe selfie screen that works with the phone you already have and costs less than $100. I didn't do with either of those familiar routes — I paid $70 to add a 5.9mm e-ink display on the back of my smartphone.

I set up this Alexa automation so my lights turn on before I walk through the door

Chris Hachey — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:30:17 GMT

My smart home amazes me sometimes. Well, it's not really the smart home itself, but the capabilities that it has that remind me why I wanted to make my home smart in the first place. Utilizing technology to make my life easier is the exact reason why I wanted to create a smart home.